Increasing Logical Disk Capacity on a drive stored on SAN Storage IBM DS3300

Most of us will be presented with the need of increasing logical disk capacity on drives that are stored in SAN. It may happen that these drives were already presented to the respective Operating Systems and in time, the need to increase the storage space on the server may arise.

I would like to share an experience of performing such an activity. First of all we need to note if your SAN Storage supports the capability of adding space to the hardware RAID container before we can perform this. On the IBM DS range of storage systems, this is supported by either doing the ADD FREE CAPACITY task on the GUI or Storage Manager or via CLI using the script editor.

After you have expanded the array, you can expand the logical drive with the additional free space from the array. On the DS 3300 series, with the Storage Manager 2 client, this can only be done using the script editor.

With which you can use the command below to perform the operation.

set logicalDrive ["DriveNameonSAN"] addCapacity=20 GB;

Now that you have added capacity on the SAN drive, this will be visible on the Operating System and you can use your OS tools to extend the volume. Note that there are conditions that need to be met before you extend the drive and is documented here

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/325590

Fortunately Windows Server 2008 has the extend feature on Disk Management so you can perform the steps on the GUI similar to the screen below.

Note that before you perform this procedure make sure you know the impact to your applications hosted on the drive to be extended. It does not hurt to do a backup as well but you already know that ;)

Certificate Services Web enrollment pages together with Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008

So you have brought in your brand new Windows Server 2008, hooked it up on the network and joined it as a member server in your domain. You decided to make this brand new server a Web Server and enable it for SSL. You open up an IE browser type in your Internal Certificate Authority Servername / certsrv page as you always do and you are suprised to receive an error.

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This is due to the fact that Windows Server 2008 and Vista rely on a different ActiveX component named Certenroll. Your existing Windows 2003 CA uses an ActiveX controll named Xenroll which is now depracated on Windows Server 2008 and Vista. You can make your existing Windows Server 2003 support web enrollment requests from Windows 2008 and Vista by applying the hotfix on this kb article.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/922706

Connecting Windows Server 2008 to iSCSI SAN Storage (Part2)

In Part1 of our Connecting Windows Server 2008 to iSCSI SAN Storage, we have discussed configuring our iSCSI Network, Creating our RAID arrays and Logical Drives, enabling the iSCSI initiator service and multipath device driver on our host, and finally mapping our host-to-logical drive for the intended host the will connect to the iSCSI SAN.

Configure the host via iSCSI initiator to connect and logon to iSCSI target portal

Let us now continue on by configuring our iSCSI software initiator which will allow us to see our drives on the operating system that was presented via the SAN using the host-to-logical drive mapping. The process for configuring our iSCSI software initiator consists of actually a couple of steps: (1) Defining the iSCSI target portal (2) Logon to the target portal (3) Setup your persistent targets and autobind the volumes

Defining the iSCSI target portal is done by specifying the IP address configured for your SAN storage's host portals, usually you will configure your host portals on both redundant controllers of the SAN storage to provide redundancy for failover. Afterwhich, we can logon to the defined target portals and for the first time see the disks presented to our Windows Server 2008 system. Lastly, you would have the target portals to be persistent and bind the volumes presented automatically so that it will remain available after a restart of the host. When you are done you will have a screen similar to the one below.

Format presented volumes on the hosts and assign drive partitions

You can choose to enable authentication like CHAP when connecting to your target portal, for this example we won't be using any authentication with our connection. Once you have completed this configuration you can go to device manager and rescan for hardware changes and you will be presented with your iSCSI disks which you can then format and partition as a normal basic or dynamic disk on Disk Management as seen below.

Enable failover for redundancy of connection to the iSCSI Logical Drives

You have now completed connecting your Windows Server 2008 Server to an iSCSI SAN Storage. But we are not quite done yet, you would likely want to enable failover on your iSCSI SAN connection between your iSCSI host. To do this, just add another target portal on your iSCSI software initiator similar to the procedure above and logon to it. You will know you have configured it correctly with the presence of an additional Universal Xport SCSI Disk Device on Device Manager and seeing redundant disk devices on your target properties similar to screen below.

You can test failover by unplugging one of your network cables connecting to your host portals on the SAN and observer the changes on Device Manager and test if access from you SAN disks. This completes our step by step guide for Connecting Windows Server 2008 to iSCSI SAN storage hope this article helped you guys out there who are doing a same deployment setup.

Connecting Windows Server 2008 to iSCSI SAN Storage (Part1)

Today I am going to share a setup of Connecting Windows Server 2008 to an iSCSI SAN Storage. For this setup, I am using IBM DS3300 iSCSI SAN storage to allocate our LUN partitions to a Windows Server 2008 Server.

The outline of the activity will be similar below:

• Configure your iSCSI hosts and target portals network


• Pre Create RAID arrays and Logical Drives on your Storage Subsystem


• Enable the iSCSI initiator feature on Windows Server 2008


• Define iSCSI hosts on the Storage Subsytem


• Install Multipath Driver on your host based on your Storage Subsytem


• Configure Host to Logical Drive Mappings on the Storage Subsystem


• Configure the host via iSCSI initiator to connect and logon to iSCSI target portal


• Format presented volumes on the hosts and assign drive partitions


• Enable failover for redundancy of connection to the iSCSI Logical Drives

The term host refers to your Windows Server 2008 system and the target portals are referring to your DS3300 storage subsytem configured with host portals.

Configure your iSCSI hosts and target portals network

First I am assuming that you have your iSCSI network setup already, it is highly recommended that you dedicate a private network for your iSCSI traffic separate from your production network card traffic. So at minimum you should have 2 network cards on your host system. 1 for your production LAN and the other for iSCSI LAN. Once you have this setup, you can set your iSCSI network card similar to screen below. Note that you should disable additional TCP/IP overhead like NETBIOS which can improve your iSCSI LAN network traffic.

Pre Create RAID arrays and Logical Drives on your Storage Subsystem

Next step is to pre create RAID arrays and Logical Drives on your storage subsystem. I won't be showing it here, but once you login to a Storage Management GUI like IBM's Storage Manager, you can easily accomplish this through the wizard. You may wish to allocate a hot spare for your RAID arrays and this can be done as well through the GUI. Once you have your RAID arrays built, you can carve out Logical Drives which you can map to intended hosts later. I also recommend that you name your Logical Drives on your SAN appropriately probably adding the servername at least to help you determine which host the drives are intended for. It can get confusing once you started carving out all those Logical Drives for all your hosts.

Enable the iSCSI initiator feature on Windows Server 2008

Now after this step, we go back to our Windows Server 2008 system and enable the iSCSI initiator service, this can be done on Server Manager and enabling the feature for the iSCSI initiator. Previously on Windows Server 2003 you would have to download the Microsoft iSCSI Software Initiator which is now on Version 2.08. Did I mention that you can use the same guide for Windows Server 2003 with a minor difference in the multipath drivers and the additional step of installing the iSCSI software initiator which is already included as a feature on Windows Server 2008.
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Define iSCSI hosts on the Storage Subsytem

Once you enable the iSCSI software initiator, make sure the service is set to start as automatic on services console. You will then be presented with your host's unique IQN (iSCSI qualified name) which you would use to define the same host on the iSCSI SAN storage subsystem as seen below.

Install Multipath Driver on your host based on your Storage Subsytem

You can then install the multipath driver on your host based on the Storage System you are using. This enables our Windows Server 2008 machine to failover to another controller of the storage subsytem if we loose communication to one path on our target portal. Note that Windows Server 2008 has the native MPIO feature and this will be automatically enabled once we install the multi path driver from our Storage System which in this case is IBM's DS3300.


Configure Host to Logical Drive Mappings on the Storage Subsystem

When this is done we are now ready to configure our host-to-logical drive mapping through our Storage Manager. This process allocates are pre configured Logical Drives on the SAN storage to the intended host as seen below.

After this step we are almost ready to see the drives on our host but not quite yet, we need to configure our iSCSI initiator to connect to the target portals configured on the SAN storage and login to it. This will be covered in Part2 of our Connecting Windows Server 2008 to iSCSI SAN Storage article.